Matt Preston asks, have restaurant menus become too complicated?

Apr 23, 2025

A good menu should be a glimpse into the soul of a restaurant, but please, spare us the guff.

“Roasted fillet of Australian Kobe beef nestling in a Kent garden of pea puree and accompanied by a succulent spinach and onion compote, to-die-for triple-cooked Maris Piper chips and Indonesian long pepper sauce.”

This might be the most famous and egregious example of menu madness. It comes from a $10,000-a-head dinner for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in the UK, as reported by the food critic for the UK’s Mail on Sunday, my friend Tom Parker Bowles.

That was 2011. But, like the perpetual motion of one of those 1950s dunking drinking birds, every 10 years or so, we dip back into the restaurant menu to see if chefs have become any better at giving us a description of what’s on offer without being wankers. And the news isn’t good, here or in the UK.

“Menus still commit heinous crimes against both grammar and prose,” says Parker Bowles, who’s probably best known here for appearing on the UK’s MasterChef and Channel 9’s The Hotplate and Family Food Fight. Oh, and for being the son of the Queen.

Credit: Chris Court

At the other end of the scale from the purple prose of beef that “nestles”, there are now those unhelpful minimalist course descriptions.

“I’ll find myself at some tweezer-wielding, ‘feen deening’ ponce-palace where the tasting menu has but one word to describe each course, and then you’re faced with course after course of the most fiddly, overwrought mouthfuls, each dish containing an embarrassment of extra ingredients, all fighting for their place in the spotlight,” Parker Bowles says.

I’d suggest that even three words to describe a dish on an a la carte menu (eg, “Duck – Fig – Radicchio”, or “salmon.orange.broccoli”) do little to help you choose what to order. Even if these words are broken up by a double space, hyphen or full stop.

And while we’re on punctuation, what is it with menus and random capitalisation? I never want to order a “Lamb ChOp with yogHurt DressiNg”. It looks like a ransom note from a deranged serial killer.

Credit: iTsock / madisonwi

Parker Bowles and I both furiously agree that a good menu sets the tone and lights the road ahead.

“It should be elegant, informative and to the point,” he says. “My main bugbears start with overwrought prose and gushing hyperbole, but I’m also not a fan of any adjectives (’delicious’, ‘delectable’ or, worst of all, ‘indulgent’) that attempt to tell me what the food is going to taste like. I’ll be the judge of that, sport.”

To this banned menu lexicon, I’ll add “artisanal”, “natural”, “iconic” and the desire to use random French words (if you aren’t selling French food) to make your restaurant seem classier and the high prices more justified.

Then there are what one US critic described as the “the gushy, pompous, overblown descriptions of the bleedin’ obvious”. UK lexicographer Susie Dent recently lambasted the unnecessary linguistic embellishment on menus that always call eggs “farm fresh” and chips “hand cut”.

And let’s never, ever again read that the fish dish has been “lightly kissed with Chef’s signature sauce”.